The orchard had stood untended on the Harlan ridge for forty years before the survey stakes went in. The clearing crew expected roots and old irrigation pipe. Forty centimeters down, the backhoe caught on something that was neither, and the foreman did the right thing: he stopped, and he called it in.
What the orchard kept turned a routine site clearance into a cold-case excavation that reached back further than anyone on the crew had been alive.
This file is cold. The full reporting, the county records, and the forensic timeline go here.